Snark bait

[John Scott]

In the endless conquest for links, SEO's of little or no character have often made a nuisance of themselves. They spam Digg and then spam your inbox requests diggs. They ask you to link to every new spam site they put up. They ask for blogroll links to totally unrelated blogs.

Now it seems that we've reached a new standard with the popularity of snark baiting. Somewhere along the way people figured out that they can "call out" somebody on their blog, and they will get links for it. Yes, links, because fights - offline or on - are still considered entertainment.

Sometimes people do deserve to be called out, but the trend is to call out people just for the linkage.

It's not a good trend, IMO, and it negatively impacts the credibility of the people who do it.

[Cricket]

There is one way to stop it. Don't respond to it.

[Julie]

I agree that it does not reflect positively on those who engage in such behavior. I think it's a lame way of attracting attention.

[NothingButNet]

What worries me is the “fave this” phenomenon. The last week on every blog I landed, I could read a “technorati fave train”, “subscribe to my feed train” and so on. And what do you say about Jhon Chow’s techniques?